Headstock Molded

The flask is opened up, and the gates are cut from sprue and riser to the pattern. The pattern is removed and this is what you would see. Close up the flask and you are ready to pour some metal into the mold.

7 thoughts on “Lathe Project”

Really hope you post more on your controller and motor drive circuits!! I want one!!!!!!! Can you e-mail me more info on this, or will i have to wait and see if you post anything more on it??????? Thanks Rick.

Whats up Morgan. I have been scraping and scraping and scraping away that my right side of my neck and back ache pretty good. I could imagine yourself with a bigger bed than mine. I was using your bed as a reference. My bed is pretty much close. I know if I add a hair thick worth of blue my bed would indicate all over the surface and probably two to three more rubs. I can’t get a .0015 feeler gauge under my bed when it is on my flat surface. I’m not sure how far to go but it was a help looking at your pictures and reading your blog. I just want this part to be over already. It is the hardest thing I ever done.

As I am scraping, sometimes I am not aware of the many things that can go wrong such as a piece of aluminum chip can fall onto the surface flat and not be visible and the only way to know is by feeling it. Or you can forget to even out your blue indicating compound and the highspots can be less visible and it can confuse you.

Anyways that is my two cents. I was wondering if you are going to take on any other Gingery projects? If so good luck and thanks for spending the time to blog about your Gingery Lathe experience it really helps. Later

Glad to hear you are making progress, by far scraping the Lathe’s bed casting was the hardest part for me. Mainly I had no prior experience with hand scraping, and initially figuring out if you are on the right track can be difficult. Good point about the aluminum chips getting in the way at times, I also had that issue and ended up running my lathe file lightly over the surface between passes to knock those areas down – typically I found that it was an issue if I had incomplete strokes with the hand scraper. Also, I found that I would sometimes get aluminum chips on my reference surface ( granite surface plate ) and that would mess up the bluing, etc… It definitely helps to be thorough with cleaning the casting between bluing and scraping, etc… All of your effort here will pay off on the other parts that need to be scraped, so it is well worth it.

One thing with the bed casting, you can probably scrape it forever – you mainly want good coverage over the whole bed to provide a consistent base for the ways such that over time they will not warp. It is better to spend your time scraping the surfaces that need to be accurate like the wear pads, front and back ways, etc…

At this point I have a few projects in the pipe, but no Gingery machines on my plate. I do want to try and automate my Gingery Lathe a bit more, so I may post about that within the year.

It makes me happy knowing that people out there are using some of the information / photos I put online and that it was helpful to some extent.